School of Geography and the Environment

Wittenham Clumps Heritage Landscape Project: Future Landscape Scenarios

As part of a new Landscape Evolution Centre, supported by a £1.7 million grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, ECI is helping to create virtual images of alternative future landscapes for a 170km² segment of South Oxfordshire. The Landscape Evolution Centre is being established by the Northmooor Trust. The future landscapes project concerns the impact that decisions made today will have on the landscapes of tomorrow. An underlying message will be that the choices we make as individuals and a society will make a difference. The ‘time stops’ for the future landscapes are 2020, 2050, and 2080.

Modelling future landscapes faces two considerable intellectual challenges. First, to create realistic alternative scenarios of future land use at the landscape scale, and secondly, to visualise these alternatives. With visualisation, there are some obvious but intriguing criteria which need consideration: for example, the visual impact potential of highly distinctive individual elements compared to widespread but less disruptive images – and crucially the nature of the drivers that might affect these elements.

Creating realistic scenarios of land use change faces huge problems of localising and down-scaling existing scenarios. The ECI is basing its work on two well-respected and large-scale scenarios: the Socio-Economic 'SRES' Scenarios used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the Climate Change Scenarios from UKCIP. The two most opposing SRES scenarios are being used: Global Markets (characterised by trade liberalisation and cheap imports) and Regional Stewardship (with a strong ecological driver).